On a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs.
Runs from the beings that only look human, who have scattered Earth’s last survivors.

To stay alone is to stay alive, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan may be her only hope.

Now Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

REVIEW

Well.

We liked the idea.

And we really *wanted* to enjoy it.

Once again, it was so lovely to gather together and have a natter about our recent reads. As is usual for our optimistic band of readers, we had approached this book with an open mind. We’ve read quite a bit of YA fiction previously and have found it to be a mixed bag – particularly in the saturated dystopia/SFF genera. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of us, before we ever started the book, we encountered those oft terrifying words ‘the first in an exciting new trilogy…‘ and our collective hearts sank.

So we indulged in a little whinge about how fiction isn’t designed to just ‘tell’ a story any more. It’s all about creating a world and re-visiting it over and over again. Which is fine, as long as it’s a world populated by interesting characters who fall into crazy exciting circumstances that sustain interest. Too often however, we’ve found that the sequels have more to do with successful branding than a need to flesh out more aspect of the plot.

So, before the vast majority of us even started the book, we were weary. And apprehensive. And there was a 50:50 chance that this book would prove to be better than we could ever have expected. As it happens, the coin landed on the other side.

In the main, we found the plot to be very predictable. As each character arrived, we guessed with near unerring accuracy what was going to happen to them. Again and again and again. One of us joked that they were starting to feel quite psychic. Oh how we laughed (actually, we did have a proper guffaw when they killed Kenny. *snigger*).

We did enjoy the Ben Parrish story line throughout the book. He felt like quite a flesh out character – albeit one in a slightly daft situation. We were torn between bemoaning the army as the fifth wave but secretly enjoying it and tearing our hair out that Ben seemed to be so incapable of recognising what was happening around him. Sure, it was a very stressful environment but we never felt like all the misery and horribleness and awfullishiousness was actually grounded in anything that we could honestly relate to.

Ben was positively a genius in comparison to Cassie though. She started off as this cool, confident kickass survivor that promptly turned into an idiot and a girrrl (not like a person girl, like a tv cardboard cut out of an actual character girl) the second a bloke appeared. I mean, it was so OBVIOUS – all of us who read it were stunned by how predictable the whole plot turned out to be but in this case, we were staring at the page blankly at her blind stupidity.

As for Evan – I am not sure that it’s fair to really describe him as a character. Some of his storyline were actually really interesting but the hammered in love story just ruined it. Ugh, creepy and bland but smells like chocolate? Where have I read something like that before? We did console ourselves that the hunter did in fact serve a useless narrative purpose as Cassie could not have saved her brother without him. But the honey-crumpet angle just over powered everything else. In fact, some of us ended up rooting for the five year old to become pyschotic – just to break from the norm.

We decided not to go into the secondary characters in too much detail as they were clearly only included for fleshing out in later books (which we are unlikely to be reading) and weren’t given a chance to do anything but page fill in this.

We were disappointed however in the whole alien/host aspect. One person noted that it felt like a really obvious way of getting around the War of the Worlds virus trope which lead to such a nice little nerdy chat for a moment that I now declare that person the Winner of book club. Sadly I didn’t write down who actually said it.

We also noted that the more we learned about the aliens, the less scary they became – particularly now that there are ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ battling to lead the cause. We also toyed with speculating as the aliens intentions; why they picked earth; why ships and so on but just didn’t have the interest of inclination to actually read the sequels and see whether we were right…so that petered right out.

We all agreed that this was a book structured and designed to appeal to the silver screen; hoping to occupy the same territory as The Hunger Games and Divergent. Having said that, goodly chunks are explained via internal dialogue which could be trickier to film.